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Summary

"Here is a text that energetically breaks out of the predictable positions and quarrels of present-day academe. It is exciting, diverse, has enormous intellectual vitality, and moves easily between science, literature, and philosophy. With Turner, with Serres, and a few others, Natoli outlines a comparatism of the future.

"In my opinion Natoli deals with the most important topic I can think of: the relationship between order and disorder in literature, in criticism, in intellectual life, ultimately in our culture. This book is not only interesting, but truly fascinating and exciting." -- Virgil Nemoianu, Catholic University of America

"This book links together an encyclopedic array of contemporary theoretical arguments and discourses by isolating what each of them has to say about the issue of order and disorder. It then applies that particular abstract argument to the analysis of a literary work, and this application demonstrates the utility and importance of the abstract claim and often results in unpredictable and provocative comments about the works. The issue of order and disorder generalizes the more narrow deconstructive concept of undecidability or 'play' and focuses the vague relations between power and resistance described by Foucault.

"There is an original and ingenious intelligence at work behind this book, and I am impressed with the author's careful attention to the passages he reads and the clarity and precision of his writing and analyses. I cannot think of another text that tries to do what this one does, nor even anything that really resembles its painstaking pairing of each theoretical point with an illustration." -- Michael Clark, University of California, Irvine

Joseph Natoli teaches postmodernism in the Center for Integrated Studies/ Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He is editor of Tracing Literary Theory, Literary Theory's Future(s), and Psychological Perspectives on Literature: Dissident Freudian and Non-Freudian; author of Twentieth Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the Present, and co-author of Psychocriticism.